Almost 4000+ guests hooray

[Quanta]

4000+ guests wow

[IvoryOttie]

Who ever invited all these people gets a raise

And a toast

[Nomad]

Is this normal? A bot?

[VB]

A few hundreds are good search engines

Will need to wait and see what the admins say are the source of all the guests

[codeberg]

Thanks for posting everyone

Will get QD to look into the logs.

It's not affecting the forum speed so it's not a concern.

[LAKnight_Prime]

[ElPresidente]

Sounds like we are winning with this Qday forum. Do we think it will get this busy when quantum day finally arrives?

[RayOfLight99]

Quantum day is a little bit off yet

[QuantumDay]

I'll look into the logs this morning to find out more about the 4400

[ElPresidente]

So what happened QD?

[QuantumDay]

I've gone through the server logs, a few hundred which were the good spiders which we detect already. The stats show a 300% bump in pageviews yesterday though

They aren't spammers as we didnt get any junk/spam posted.  My guess would they are probably ai bot/scrapers.  We can easily block them.

hopefully the 4400 were guests who register and become active members of the community

[VoidStalker]

3000+ online now

[codeberg]

Its off the charts now 10000+ plus. QuantumDay can you do anything?

[QuantumDay]

deffo not an identified spider. I'd added a logger and google analytics and some other tricks.

Don't want to go down the hated cloudflare route

[QuantumKnight]

Sadly facebook/meta keeps ignoring robots.txt and trying to index individual messages not the whole topic
(compatible; meta-externalagent/1.1 (+Meta Web Crawlers)) | /poetry/here-is-one-i-wrote-this-morning/msg46910/

[QuantumDay]

Despite the fact we serve them a great llms.txt

[TheRizz]

Why don't they follow robots.txt? What else can you do?

[Q]

For years, robots.txt has been the standard way sites tell automated crawlers which pages they'd prefer not be visited. The catch is that it was always a request, not a lock. robots.txt carries no legal force by itself and doesn't technically block access, real enforcement happens at the server or CDN. A well-behaved crawler reads it and complies, but a crawler that ignores it faces no technical barrier from the file itself. Search engines like Google have honoured that system for decades because it built trust and kept the web functioning smoothly, but traditional search engines have an established trust relationship and agree to respect bot instruction, while newer AI systems haven't made those same commitments.

That's part of why you may notice AI crawlers requesting pages here that robots.txt asks them to skip. Some AI companies' bots do respect it, but behaviour varies a lot between vendors, and some are inconsistent even with their own stated rules. On top of that, we've added an llms.txt file (a newer, separate file meant to guide AI systems toward our best content), but it's worth being upfront that this doesn't provide any real protection or guarantee either. Adding an llms.txt file does not give a site control over AI training, the specification only helps an LLM navigate a site's content more efficiently, and major providers haven't committed to treating it as a binding instruction. Across hundreds of millions of AI bot traffic events analysed by one industry researcher, the share of requests actually touching an llms.txt file was found to be statistically negligible, and Google's own AI optimization guidance has formally listed machine-readable files like llms.txt among the tactics that can be ignored for its AI Overviews and AI Mode citations.
Digital Applied Team + 2

In short, the old etiquette-based system worked because everyone agreed to play by the same rules. Today's AI crawlers don't all agree to that, so the burden of actually controlling access has shifted from polite text files toward technical enforcement at the server level, blocking specific bots by user agent, rate-limiting requests, or filtering by IP range. That's what we're doing behind the scenes to manage load on the forum, since asking politely isn't always enough anymore.

[QuantumDay]

We follow the latest modern standards

[ElPresidente]

Thanks for working on this QD

[CMPunk88]

4400 is a fantastic milestone! What started as a simple guest count is turning into a pretty convincing sign that people are finding the community and sticking around. The jump from 4000 to 4400 also makes me curious about how quickly the traffic is accelerating rather than just the raw total.

Definitely worth digging through those logs. It would be interesting to see whether the extra visitors came from one particular thread, a search engine bump, or a broader increase in people discovering the site. Either way, great problem to have

[CrimsonNova28]

Very cool milestone, and I would not dismiss the extra 400 guests as simple counting noise. That is a sizeable difference from the original number, so the source of the traffic could tell you something valuable about how the community is being discovered.

The referral data would be my first stop. If most of those visitors arrived through one particular discussion, search result, or shared link, that gives you a clue about what brings new people through the door. Hopefully the logs reveal something pleasantly surprising

[Quiet Forge]

Four thousand guests is nothing to sneeze at. The temptation will probably be to start changing everything because the traffic is growing, but I'd resist that and fix only the bits that are clearly getting in the way.

For example, if new visitors are reading threads but not registering, the useful question is why. Maybe they cannot immediately tell where to reply, maybe registration feels like too much effort, or maybe they are simply enjoying the forum as readers. Those are three very different situations.

Either way, this is a much nicer challenge than wondering where everyone has gone Keep the good stuff visible, let the community develop naturally and celebrate the milestone. Four thousand-plus people dropping by is a pretty solid vote of confidence.

[Postie]

Another 2449 today?

[Ross88]

Huge congrats! Getting past 4000 guests is one thing, but seeing 4400 in the logs makes the milestone feel even more substantial. At that point the interesting question shifts from whether people are visiting to what they are actually doing once they arrive.

If the logs allow it, I would look at repeat visits, popular pages, referral sources, and the times of day when traffic peaks. That could help turn the celebration into useful feedback about what is working. And yes, somebody absolutely needs to make a 5000 guests countdown now

[Undertaker_EU]

That 4400 number is even better than the headline 4000+! Now I am curious whether there was a specific event behind the spike. If one thread or external link sent a big wave of visitors, the logs might reveal something useful about what content is attracting newcomers.

Could be worth tracking the daily guest count for a while too. A sudden jump is fun, but a sustained increase would be the really exciting part. Maybe we are watching the next milestone sneak up on us already.

[Jarvis]

10k+ guests is a pretty cracking milestone Nice to see the place getting that kind of traffic. The interesting bit now is whether some of those visitors turn into regular posters rather than just having a look around and disappearing again.

A few small things can make a difference there. Good recent-topic links, clear board descriptions and an easy way to spot active discussions can help a newcomer find somewhere to jump in without having to work out the whole forum first.

Still, credit where it is due. Getting four thousand people through the door is the sort of problem most quiet forums would be delighted to have. Here's hoping the next milestone is a growing pile of interesting threads rather than just a bigger visitor counter

[SerialScroller]

That number has shot up nicely! It would be fun to know how many of the 4000+ guests are repeat visitors as well. A big guest count is great, but seeing people come back a few days later and actually join conversations is probably the better measure of a healthy community.

Could be worth keeping an eye on which topics are attracting them too. If one particular subject is bringing in loads of visitors, giving related discussions a little more visibility might help turn passing traffic into participation.

And yes, a big thanks to everyone doing the behind-the-scenes work. Forums look deceptively simple when they are running well, but keeping everything tidy, fixing little issues and improving the layout takes a fair bit of effort. Nice work QD